Updates to R package emdatr: More than 21000 Natural Disasters since 1900

The International Disaster Database, EMDAT database from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, Belgium) is often used as a reference for losses on human life and property resulting from select natural and man-made disasters. The goal of the emdatr package is to improve the EMDAT database by promoting its use, shedding light on its limitations, and making analysis of the data easier using R

Major updates in emdatr v0.3:

• Latest data from EMDAT has been included, additional data on loss 'normalization' also updated when available.
• Vignette has been changed from a PDF to a markdown document.

Here is the emdatr package home page on CRAN.

Updates to R package emdatr: Global Disaster Losses from the EMDAT Database

The EMDAT database provides valuable information on human and financial losses from natural disasters around the world. Some of the issues with the EMDAT data are lack of entire data accessibility, static and inconsistent summary reports, and the lack of auxiliary financial and demographic data. The emdatr package addresses some of these issues. 

Major updates in emdatr v0.2:

• Data has been updated to include the whole of 2013.
• Data is now hosted on bitbucket.org and only a sample is provided with the package. Package has the functionality to extract the entire data.
• A new vignette which explains the raw data clean-up and enhancement procedure and which also demonstrates use of the package.

Here is the emdatr package home page on CRAN. Below is a summary graphic on number of natural disasters by decade obtained using the package.

The Tornado Project

Goal

Bring consistency and transparency to the analyses of publicly available Tornado datasets using an R-based open source analysis.

Issues

Tornado data available from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center and other government agencies around the world has been the focus of many studies (e.g., see below references). However, there are a number of issues with these studies:

• The data itself is changing - both in quantity (additional data added every season) and quality (quality control measures appear to have been applied in the recent past, particularly to the data prior to the 1990s). Hence, it is not possible to exactly, or sometimes even approximately, reproduce the results of these studies.
• Since the data size is annually changing, it makes more sense to have the analyses revised annually as well. 
• With the exception of a few (thanks to R user Prof. James Elsner and colleagues), none of the studies provide the code used in their analysis. Moreover, one of the recent studies (Simmons et al 2013) appears to have several errors.
• Data prior to 1950 in the United States appears to be available only on microfilm. Hopefully, through or due to this effort, some day this data becomes more widely available.

Specific Objectives

1. Create an R package 
• The package would come with raw and cleaned Tornado data
2. Functionality provided by the R package would include:
• reproduction/replication of summary statistics presented by literature studies. 
• adjustment of historical monetary losses for inflation and other factors based on literature
• creation of stochastic and probabilistic models of Tornado hazard, based on literature.
3. Extend the above to Tornado data from other parts of the world.

Project home

• GitHub repo - https://github.com/RationShop/tornado_r

Any help or comments appreciated.

References

•  NOAA Storm Prediction Center (SPC)
• Main page - http://www.spc.noaa.gov/gis/svrgis/
• Summary statistics 1950-99 - http://www.spc.noaa.gov/archive/tornadoes/ustdbmy.html
• Summary statistics 2000-present - http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/online/monthly/newm.html
• Simmons, Sutter & Pielke, 2013, "Normalized tornado damage in the United States: 1950 - 2011", Environmental Hazards, 12(2), pp. 132-147.
• Elsner, Murnane, Jagger & Widen, 2013, "A spatial point process model for violent tornado occurrence in the U.S. Great Plains", Mathematical Geosciences, 45(6), pp. 667-679. Code available at - http://rpubs.com/jelsner/4205
• Verbout, Brooks, Leslie, & Schultz, 2006, "Evolution of the U.S. Tornado Database: 1954-2003", Weather and Forecasting, pp. 86-93.
• Boruff, Easoz, Jones, Landry, Mitchem & Cutter, 2003, "Tornado hazards in the United States", Climate Research, 24, pp. 103-117.
• Brooks & Doswell, 2001, "Some aspects of the international climatology of tornadoes by damage classification", Atmospheric Research, 56, pp. 191-201.
• Grazulis, 1993, "A 110-Year Perspective of Significant Tornadoes", The Tornado: Its Structure, Dynamics, Prediction, and Hazards, Geophysical Monograph 79, pp. 467-474.

New R package emdatr: Global Disaster Losses from the EM-DAT Database

The International Disaster Database EM-DAT from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, Belgium) is often used as a reference for losses on human life and property resulting from natural and man-made disasters. This database has over 20,000 country-level records from the early 1900s to the present. Data is available for free from EMDAT.

Some issues with EM-DAT data and reports:

• Country names used by EMDAT are not always the same as those used by ISO 3166 convention. This issue is relevant when making spatial maps using R. 
• Information such as GDP and population from the year of occurrence of the disaster have to be used to "normalize" or adjust monetary losses from the past. The EMDAT database does not provide such information. 
• Annual reports published by EMDAT are not consistent with one another in terms of number of disasters per year or the total number of people affected/killed. For instance, number of diasters in 2002 were reported to be 428 in the ADSR 2012 report. But the same number in the 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008 reports is 421, 421, 422 and 421, respectively!

R package emdatr:

• comes with pre-processed and cleaned EMDAT data
• includes above-mentioned additional country-level information
• has functionality to extract desired subsets of the data
• through the graphics and modeling capabilities provided by R, much more can be accomplished through this R package and the R language, than conventional spreadsheet analyses
• by making the analysis transparent, the problems with the presentation of summary statistics could be addressed

The home page for the package presents some examples and graphics. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/emdatr

Below are the relevant CRAN and GitHub sites:

• CRAN package repository
• GitHub site for the preliminary work towards the R package emdatr
• GitHub site for the final R package emdatr

Please let me know if you find any errors or if you have any comments or suggestions.

New R package sheldusr: Losses from Natural Disasters in the United States

The SHELDUS database is database on human and property losses from natural disasters in the United States. Although the data is free, downloading the data is tedious and so is cleaning and analyzing it. The new R package sheldusr comes with the cleaned and pre-processed SHELDUS data and includes functionality to retrieve data for any desired time period or natural hazard(s) of interest.

The home page for the package presents some examples and graphics. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/sheldusr

Below are the relevant CRAN and GitHub sites:

• CRAN package repository
• GitHub site for the preliminary work towards the R package sheldusr
• GitHub site for the final R package sheldusr

This is my first package and I think it could be improved in several ways. I hope to make these improvements in the coming months. In the meantime, please let me know if you find any errors or if you have any comments or suggestions.